The Bedroom With Two Windows for Danny

The door to the basement was at the end of Trina’s kitchen, past the refrigerator, and it had a hook and eye latch on the outside of it.

I noticed the latch before I noticed anything else. It was the kind you put on a screen door to keep a dog from nosing it open. It was set high, at grown-up height.

“He’s down there,” Trina said, without turning around from the sink. “He likes it down there. It’s quiet.”

It was March, and it was Danny’s thirty-first birthday, and I had a cake in a carrier on my hip and a gift bag hanging off my wrist with a new Razorbacks cap in it.

I had driven forty minutes from our place outside town to Trina’s house in town because Danny had called me twice that week to remind me. “Kristy, it’s my birthday Saturday. Don’t forget the cake. Chocolate.”

I lifted the latch and went down.

The stairs were open wooden treads with no backs to them, the kind you can see through to the dark underneath. There was one bulb on a pull chain at the bottom, and the air smelled like wet concrete and dryer sheets.

Danny’s bed was against the far wall. It was his bed from Mama’s house, the twin with the headboard Daddy had made out of an old church pew, and it looked small and lost on that gray floor.

There was a dehumidifier humming in the corner. There was a box fan, a lamp sitting on a milk crate, and his clothes folded in two laundry baskets because there was no dresser.

There was no window. Not a small one up high, not a block glass one. Just four walls of poured concrete, the water heater, and Trina’s Christmas totes stacked under the stairs.

Danny was sitting on the edge of the bed in his socks, watching a game show on a little tablet with the volume up loud. When he saw me he stood up so fast he nearly knocked the lamp off the crate.

“Kristy! You brought it!”

“I brought it,” I said. “Chocolate. Like you told me twice.”

He hugged me the way he has hugged me since he was a little boy, with his whole body and his chin hooked over my shoulder, and I held on a beat longer than usual so he would not see my face.

Danny has Down syndrome. He was born when Mama was forty-one and I was five, and Trina was ten, and from the first week home he was the center of our house. Daddy called him the foreman.

He bags groceries three mornings a week at the Harps in town. He knows every regular by name and what they buy. He can tell you the score of every Razorbacks game since he was twelve.

What he cannot do is drive, or keep track of a checking account, or argue with someone who talks fast. Mama always said Danny’s heart was quicker than his words, and people took advantage of the gap.

“How long have you been sleeping down here, bud?” I asked him.

He thought about it. Danny thinks about questions honestly. He does not give you the easy answer.

“Since after Christmas,” he said. “Before that I slept on the couch. Then Trina said the kids needed the living room back.”

“Do you like it down here?”